Austin, Texas (CNN) -- Twitter CEO Evan Williams
announced a product Monday that will further
integrate Twitter feeds into other Web sites.
The "@anywhere" feature will allow users to post
to Twitter from a number of other sites and to
comment on each other's posts without visiting
Twitter.com.
"Imagine being able to follow a New York Times
journalist directly from her byline, tweet about a
video without leaving YouTube, and discover new
Twitter accounts while visiting the Yahoo! home
page -- and that's just the beginning," the company
wrote in a blog post.
The feature, which is expected to launch soon,
will be introduced first on 13 Web sites, including
The New York Times, Amazon, eBay, Bing, YouTube and
The Huffington Post.
Williams made the announcement at the South by
Southwest Interactive festival, which is a yearly
gathering of technology enthusiasts. Twitter
debuted at South by Southwest in 2007.
The @anywhere feature will make browsing the Web
more seamless and help Web users find sites and
videos more easily, Williams said.
"One of the things we've found with Twitter is
that discovery is one of the hardest challenges,"
he said.
"Twitter drives tons of traffic. ... It should
result in more followers for a site than just
sending out links does," Williams said. "It should
hopefully result in more people who are your
audience [and who are] using Twitter talking among
themselves about your content."
Williams' keynote was one of the most highly
anticipated events at SXSW, but the speech was met
with some negative reaction from the audience in
Austin, Texas.
Twitter executives have acknowledged plans to
add advertising to the site, which currently is
free of ads. Many attendees said they had hoped
Williams would talk about how such advertising
would work on Twitter.
Instead, some audience members began filing out
of the keynote address, which was held as an
on-stage interview, about 40 minutes after it
started. By the time the interview was over, the
hall was more than half-empty.
The session also took a real-time beating on
Twitter.
"I've seen more energy at a lawn bowling
tournament," one user wrote.
In an interview with CNN, Williams said Twitter
doesn't have anything to announce in relation to
its advertising plans.
"Unfortunately, we're not in control of what
people anticipate we'll announce," he said.
The measured reactions to the @anywhere feature
didn't help the energy level at Williams' talk.
"It's an interesting idea to bring Twitter out
into the ecosystem, but I think at the end of the
day, the intelligence [it would provide] is a
little light," said John Logioco, vice president of
Outbrain, which makes a widget designed to suggest
content on a Web page based on a person's
preferences.
"What we're looking for on the Web, I think, is
less noise, not more noise."
It's unclear exactly when the @anywhere feature
will launch. Williams said in an interview that
prototypes are being tested now.
"I don't know if we have a launch date yet," he
said. "We have participating sites who are working
on implementing it right now, and we have sort of
prototypes working. It will depend somewhat on the
sites who are implementing it when it actually
launches because everybody is sort of adopting it
differently."
Posted 10:05
2 comments
ads
I think it's interesting that they are going to be
adding ads to twitter. I wonder how that will work
out. Everyone needs to make a buck.